04/14/2026
(Toady One) Here's a quality of life patch that addresses various issues. You can see your active petitions now and it's harder to disband squads accidentally. Clothing wears down more slowly. Selecting items inside bins during trade works more intuitively. You can see the products and required items for jobs in workshops. Soldiers wear boots properly. See the full list below.

General updates

• Added display of accepted petition building projects (guildhalls and temples).
• Added standing orders to automatically accept or reject citizen petitions and various residency petitions.
• Added standing orders allowing mining designations to globally ignore new warm/damp stone warnings.
• Squad disband icon is no longer a red X that looks like it closes the menu.
• Disbanding squads now requires confirmation.
• Items suffer less damage from age and worn items wear down more slowly.
• Traders bring clothes properly sized for all fortress citizens and long-term residents.
• Added tooltips showing products and required materials when adding new tasks in workshops.
• Changed behavior of bin selection in trade menu. Clicking the bin now selects all items inside as well, and these can be unselected one at a time. Clicking a selected bin unselects all of its contents.
• You can now click anywhere on item listings in the trade/barter menus to select the item.
• Added a select all button to the move-goods-to-depot menu.
• Made squad soldiers remove shoes properly if they conflict with their uniform's boots.
• Reordered work order buttons.
• Clicking on name of work order or shop text allows number entry.
• Made the difficulty setting "priesthood unit count" properly effect temple petitions.
• Closing the unit selector no longer also closes menu that opened it.
• Made stone use and children's chore scrollbars work properly.
• Changed citizens label to residents in unit list to reflect all who are listed.
• Show residency vs. citizenship status on unit summary sheet.
• Shows the deity being worshipped in meeting hall location info box.
• Shows the deity being worshipped in location assignment list.
• Shows location type in meeting hall location info box.
• Shows location type in location assignment list.
• Shows current guildhall existence/petition status when choosing a new guildhall.
• Shows current temple existence/petition status when choosing a new temple.

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2026-04-14: DF 53.12 Released
DF Version 53.12 has been released.

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04/06/2026
(Toady One) The first part of the month I'm working on a routine patch. This time around we're focusing on some more long-standing usability issues.

I've changed how bins work on the trade screen so you can select all the items by clicking the bin, and then uncheck items if you want to remove a few (rather than the other way around, which was weird.) You can also click anywhere on the entry rather than having to hit the checkbox.

There's a list of accepted building petitions for temples and guildhalls now so you can remember them and check on your progress, and more information is shown in location lists about the religions and guilds and petitions.

Traders bring properly sized clothing, including a proportional amount for any oddly-shaped long-term residents and citizens. They also bring more finished clothing. I also made clothes wear down more slowly.

I added tooltips when adding a new workshop task to show the product and required materials. I also reordered some buttons on the work order menu.

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04/01/2026
(Toady One) Here is

the report

for the month of April. And here's

the Future of the Fortress reply.

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03/31/2026
(Toady One) Hello. Since the last patch, things have been afoot in Magicville. I spent some time on magical populations of people, and the infrastructure we need for that. For instance, a world can have an earlier civilization where everybody can links to one of the procedural generated magic forces and use effects more freely than the lab-using wizards of the fort mode era. That sort of thing is in now, with the relevant objects generated by lua but available in the regular interaction txt files.

The next chunk of time I spent working on the labs, since Jacob provided over three hundred images of lab bits for me to use ha ha. The game can now construct images of workshops supporting a variety of different vibes, from botany to rune-carving to orbs and mirrors to necromancy to brewing and alchemy to scrolls and books to lightning. We've kept them the standard 3x3 tile size to make it all manageable, but there are some animations (for mechanisms, electricity, candle flames, etc.). It's pretty wholesome.

I'm going to switch gears now to the next routine patch, for sometime mid-Aprilish. So far it seems like magic work and routine patches will co-exist nicely, which is good. If I can keep up a monthly patch cycle while making progress on the magic/army/diplomacy release, that should be good enough.

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03/04/2026
(Toady One) Here's another routine patch. Notably, good food should make dwarves happier and they should seek out better food. I've been sick through February so the changes are a bit sparse, but I should be back at things now.

General updates

• Made happy food thought levels easier to obtain (more in line with newer food values).
• Dwarves seek good meals more aggressively and value better foods over worse ones more precisely.
• Stopped dwarves from forgetting friends/grudges they rarely meet after a few years.
• Added item dimension check to strange moods to make sure they don't gather e.g. infinite cloth from hospital zones.
• Stopped world gen interrogations from sometimes disordering known site records.
• Fixed crash issue with error-logging for certain modded languages.
• Fixed some potential multithreading stability issues.
• Added some crash-proofing to conversations.
• Worldgen now aborts instead of quitting the whole game when a raw object is missing.
• Fixed issue causing deletion of nemesis records for units.
• Made several distance calculations euclidean instead of rectangular.
• Fixed issue with temperature check so that certain items (butchery products etc.) respond to temperature properly.
• Changed filesystem for certain setups to support UTF-8 strings.
• Fixed problem causing party tactical AI settings to be unchangeable.
• Fixed display problem for desired metal cages and chains in dungeons.
• Fixed problem causing generated creatures to not be immune to their own poisons.
• Stopped channeling in the undiggable underworld.
• Made choreographers and composers use existing music and poems for their works instead of always making new ones.
• Made werebeast types duplicate if necessary rather than creating blobs (only applies if werebeast curse number set higher than 72).
• Fixed typo in angel descriptions.

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2026-03-04: DF 53.11 Released
DF Version 53.11 has been released.

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03/01/2026
(Toady One) A

report

for this month. Here is the

Future of the Fortress reply.

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02/07/2026
(Toady One) Here's

the report

for the month. There is

also a Future of the Fortress reply.

(Comment on this)

01/12/2026
(Toady One) This patch fixes a freeze and a display error in some creature lists. We also added the final aquatic portraits.

General updates

• Stopped game from freezing during some item storage checks related to burrows.

Graphics updates

• Added 28 aquatic portraits to finish the set.
• Made dwarves clothed again in certain lists.
• Stopped last portrait being shown on small animal sheets if the animal has no portrait.
• Made female peachick visible again.

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2026-01-12: DF 53.10 Released
DF Version 53.10 has been released.

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01/07/2026
(Toady One) Here's a patch with lots of routine fixes. Lots of new portraits and some updated portraits. Small experimental beasts now have their own colorful graphics to match the forgotten beasts. Find details below:

Graphics updates

• New procedural graphics for small experiments.
• New animal portraits, and some new full body animal tiles.
• Can pop up basic small animal sheets to view portraits and read descriptions for small animals.
• Offering place, display furniture, and nest box show proper item materials when placed as buildings.
• Uses proper list icons for creatures when choosing animals in embark or adventure setup.
• Added further box highlighting for chosen/hero/ordinary selection in Classic.
• Added error log for unrecognized tile graphics rectangle tokens.
• Properly sized giant flying/gray squirrel list icons and corpses.
• Fixed upright weapon trap display error.
• Minimap properly updates on certain recenter commands.

General updates

• Stopped mood dwarves from choosing inaccessible workshops and causing path cancellation lag.
• Dwarves no longer try to store pile and tomb items which are located outside their burrows.
• Dwarves no longer try to store carried objects outside of their burrows.
• Stopped dwarves with no working grasps from trying to store owned objects and excess equipment.
• Made armor appear again on many non-sieging units where it was missing.
• Mothers seeking lost infants no longer respect burrows but do respect chains.
• Mothers no longer seek ghostly babies.
• If an egg hatches and the mother is assigned to a zone (e.g. pasture), the baby is now assigned to the zone.
• Soldiers given an order while hauling will now drop their hauled job items instead of taking them along on duty.
• Dwarves heading off to meetings will drop hauled items from cancelled jobs.
• Dwarves are more likely to handle their hauled drink-related items after drinking.
• Appropriate buildings now stop rain and snow.
• Added indication during assignment of specific military items whether the item is already assigned elsewhere.
• Animal traps can catch subterranean water creatures like cave lobsters again.
• Cave lobsters can be processed in the fishery and their shell can be used for shell crafts.
• Creatures that leave statue corpses now leave statues of themselves rather than of random creatures.
• Prophets and other religious people with prophetic belief systems will no longer include incorrect beliefs in their greetings.
• Stopped pedestals and display cases from being allowed to display themselves.
• Made mussels and oysters stop appearing on land when animals root around near oceans.
• Stopped a few illegal werebeast types from being created.
• Added visual button to back out of art element creation and deletion.
• Fixed conflicting hauling/hot keys keybindings. You may have to restore defaults or update it yourself if you have custom bindings.
• Specified amount created in some job names.
• Fixed some item description grammar.
• Fixed broken child/baby strings in certain contexts like action reports.
• Cleaned up procedural creature text a bit.
• Fixed incorrect name for coral material.
• Fixed improper text for mythical dream objects.
• Giant and animal person variants of pool creatures will now appear in savage lakes. (New worlds)
• Fixed a few typos with key binding text.

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2026-01-07: DF 53.09 Released
DF Version 53.09 has been released.

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01/01/2026
(Toady One) A

report

to start the year.

A Future of the Fortress reply

also.

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12/19/2025
(Toady One) Here's a little patch to clean up some issues that sprang up (broken deconstruction speeds, broken work detail scrollbar.)

I've also tried to adjust the new material-based dwarf dig speeds to be faster overall - there had to be give somewhere, so legendary miners now aren't as relatively speedy (they are still twice as fast as a novice.) Native metals were also taking way too long to mine. And the lack of drinks effect was coming on a little too strong too early in mining in a noticeable way.

General updates

• Reduced erroneously long deconstruction speeds.
• Fixed broken scrollbar for work detail labor list.
• Changed relationship between mining speed, mining skill, and materials.
• Fixed broken mining speeds for native metals.
• Moderated lack of drink effect on work speed.

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2025-12-19: DF 53.08 Released
DF Version 53.08 has been released.

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12/18/2025
(Toady One) Here's another patch for the Siege Update. Dwarves will now have happy thoughts to bolster them after sieges, while invader movement has been made a bit more dynamic. There are lots of new animal portraits. Hundreds of them! And the lua has been brought in line with our full set of procedural creature graphics, so forgotten beasts in new worlds should look extra fancy now.

Siege Updates

• Added a positive thought for everybody in the fortress when a siege is defeated.
• Made siege leaders a bit more dynamic when cut off.
• Made fleeing invaders with special movement (flying, magma etc.) escape more cleanly.
• Added invasion creature cap and strength to the difficulty settings.
• Pick/wall material now impacts digging speed through natural materials (for invaders and the player).
• Hunters reserve only 25 bolts at embark now.
• Default archer uniforms at embark specifies weapon if civilization has only one type.
• Default archer uniforms at embark created for both leather and metal armor.

Graphics Updates

• Added hundreds of new creature portraits, and added new full body graphics for a few natural creatures.
• Added some new graphical layers to forgotten beasts/demons/titans and enhanced other layers.
• Added some missing graphical layers and tweaks to forgotten beasts/demons/titans/experiments.

General Updates

• Fixed a crash caused by kitchen input with no entries.
• Fixed a crash related to post-worldgen population growth.
• Stopped items thrown at visitors by tantruming dwarves from causing an escalation to lethal combat.
• Stopped drunk/tantrum brawlers from attacking small and vulnerable body parts like the throat.
• Throwing and pinching are no longer considered brawling-level moves.
• Added a chance for falling creatures and objects to bounce at each level of stairs or heavy branches, rather than falling all the way down.
• Added (economic) difficulty setting for fortress dig speed. Currently the same on normal/hard.
• Tree/axe material impacts tree felling speed.
• Stopped certain children/animals from being born with negative sizes and/or random ages.
• Displayed correct age in years on sheets, respecting birthday.
• Displayed proper experimented-upon historical figure name in experiment description.
• Stopped fort vampires from attempting to disguise their kills with unique "Zero Kill" text on their kill list.
• Handled a few more issues with hospital patients and caretakers being frozen.
• Fixed grazer status only being displayed for grazers with long names.
• Brought mead value in line with other drinks.
• Properly respected complete ocean edge minimum settings of 1 and 2 during world generation.
• Added a mitigation for underground feature save corruption.
• Fixed some sort issues with lua for RNG stability.

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2025-12-18: DF 53.07 Released
DF Version 53.07 has been released.

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12/01/2025
(Toady One) A

monthly report.



A Future of the Fortress reply.

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2025-11-24: DF 53.06 Released
DF Version 53.06 has been released.

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